Let them eat jet noise

Vol. 44

In This Issue: ESSAY | TAKE ACTION | NOW READ THIS | LIVE MUSIC | FINAL FRAME

Let them eat jet noise

Yesterday over lunch, I went out walking with our two small dogs and took in the sights and sounds of our little neighborhood. I love most things about our place on the northeast side of Madison. We get a surprisingly diverse array of migratory birds in spring, who land to rest and refuel in the patch of woods between us and Madison College. Starkweather Creek runs alongside the bike path here, this week the waters swollen with all the recent rain. There’s a small park with a stone walking labyrinth in the middle, and a kiosk along the bike path with notices from the neighborhood association about volunteer workdays, lost cat fliers, and a “dog of the month” feature. 

Compared to many Madison neighborhoods, ours is fairly diverse - in large part because it has been one of the last affordable enclaves in the city (both for renters and owners). There’s a mix of apartments, condos, duplexes, and single-family homes. 

One of the reasons the neighborhood remained reasonably affordable was undoubtedly due to our proximity to Dane County Regional Airport. Commercial jets take off and land close overhead many times every day. It’s not great, but it’s manageable. The other trade-off is that runoff from the airport and the adjacent Air National Guard base has polluted Starkweather Creek so badly that permanent signs are now posted warning people to keep themselves and their pets away from the water due to extremely high levels of PFAS contamination.

The cherry on top? Despite strenuous objections from local residents and environmental justice advocates, and an Environmental Impact Report showing the disproportionate negative impact on low-income and people of color, the Pentagon decided to house a fleet of F-35 fighter jets at the base as of 2023 (you can read some excellent, in-depth reporting about the lead-up to their beddown over at Tone). 

The new jets are much, much louder than the old F-15s that the base used to house, and orders of magnitude louder and more jarring than the commercial airplanes. They also fly with greater frequency–most days of the week, several times a day, with 3-5 planes taking off in a row, right over our heads. 

While out walking my dogs, I never know if we’ll have the misfortune of coinciding with the jets taking off. It happened yesterday, and I always have to choose between protecting my own ears or those of my poor dogs. I don’t have enough hands for all of us. The sound is, simply put, excruciating. And I say this as someone who has been a musician and DJ for years. I know something about dangerous sound levels.

But the Pentagon gets what the Pentagon wants, and Tammy Baldwin needed to win reelection or something, so us poor schmoes in the flight path get to pay the price–day in and day out.

That’s one thing. It’s a whole other thing for the city now to be pushing for a new, 900-unit housing development that would fall within the area assessed to be “incompatible for residential use” by the Federal Aviation Administration’s own report. The city and county are at odds about this proposal, with the county pushing against and the city for it.

Madison desperately needs more housing–in particular, affordable housing. The shortage is causing real harm to a lot of people. The answer is not, however, to push more lower-income folks into housing that will instantly be impacted by massive environmental issues like the jet noise and PFAS pollution.

Yet that’s precisely the argument that Dave Cieslewicz makes in his recent opinion column for Isthmus. The former Madison mayor says: 

How much of a nanny state do you want? Do you want to say that there will be no housing here at all to protect consumers from themselves or do you want to produce housing and let fully informed individuals weigh the costs and benefits? For myself, I’ve become more of a free market guy and somewhat less enamored of regulation. I’m not quite Milton Friedman, but I’m more attuned to free market arguments than I used to be.

It’s “Build it all and let God sort ‘em out,” but for brain-rotted free marketeers. Dave, like too many of our other supposed civic leaders, can’t see the forest for the trees (perhaps that’s because he now splits his time between Madison and the Upper Peninsula–must be nice to be able to afford two places to live!). 

It’s telling that he throws around a loaded term like “nanny state” as a scare tactic here. Americans hate feeling like they’re being told what to do. I don’t always like it, either, but then I grew up and learned about caring about other people. And good regulation isn’t about creating oppressive bureaucracy–it’s about taking communal responsibility. It’s about preventing the people with more money and power from running roughshod over everyone else.

Is it better to say from the jump that housing can’t be built where there are unremediated noise and water pollution issues, or to allow it and then, inevitably, have only those people with the least means moving in there and facing the consequences? Yes, you can tell them about the problems, but what other choice do they have? Lots of people move into places that are falling apart or polluted who would really rather not be there. They just don’t have other options–largely because the ruling classes can’t be bothered to think and act with more creativity and compassion.

All of this just continues the trend of placing the largest burden/impacts on those who are already living on the knife’s edge.

Credit where it’s due: Dave does make a couple of good suggestions about housing policy in his piece, though they’re certainly not his unique ideas. The city needs more density - taller buildings, mixed use zoning, etc. - to add more housing to areas that are the most walkable and that already have access to needed services. I like the Madison skyline as much as the next person who’s lived here long enough to see it already radically transformed over the past two decades, but it’s ridiculous that we don’t allow the kind of infill and building up that would help alleviate some of these issues.

I’ll take it a step further, though: It’s also ridiculous that we don’t have mechanisms like rent control, which would help prevent longtime residents from being priced out of their homes entirely and create housing stock that’s truly affordable for more people.

If we can’t break the stranglehold of the landlord class and the well-to-do white Madison NIMBY homeowner, and reform some of the terrible state laws enacted under Scott Walker to block local control and regulation, we won’t be able to meaningfully address the housing shortage. Not without creating even more problems for the people who can least afford it, anyway.

We have to get serious about the issue, and creative with the solutions. The free market will not save us–it never has and never will. Too many bad actors take advantage of their power and privilege to squeeze every last dollar and cent out of people with less, caring little for the social or environmental destruction they leave in their wake. We’re being peddled an illusion of choice, when the options are “take this substandard, polluted place or take nothing at all.”

I’ll keep old-man-yelling-at-cloud the jets as they blast overhead, interrupting my work meetings, naps, and casual conversations, and making my ears ring. Maybe I’ll find some ear muffs for the dogs. Someday, maybe, the funding to install sound insulation in our windows will come through (hah!). But nothing is being done to dampen the roar while we’re trying to enjoy the outdoors, or just open windows. And not much is being done to clean up Starkweather Creek, either (no one responsible for the pollution seems to want to do anything about it).

We’ll stay in our neighborhood for the time being, because we’ve grown to know and love our neighbors and this little patch of urban nature–and because we can’t find anywhere within our (triple income, no-kids!) budget to move that’s any better or bigger and still within city limits.

I’d like to live in a city and state that takes the wants and needs of its less affluent (and less white) citizens far more seriously. That absolutely means more housing, and there is absolutely a way to do that that doesn’t impose unnecessary burdens and consequences on the people moving in. I hope we can find the collective will to do that, sooner rather than later.

Take Action.

The longest serving political prisoner in United States history is up for what’s likely to be his last shot at parole, at the age of 79. Leonard Peltier has already had 48 years of his life stolen for a sentence based on a conviction that would not hold up in court today. 

Read more about Leonard’s (and the American Indian Movement’s) story here.

Sign your name onto the petition for Leonard to get parole and spend his last days getting the care that he needs and with the freedom so long denied him, and/or pitch in to fund those efforts through the Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund.

Now Read This.

“What we learned from UW-Madison’s pro-Palestine encampment” [Christina Leiffring and Emily Mills for Tone]

I had the opportunity to talk with Tone’s News & Politics Editor, Christina Leiffring, about our experiences at the encampment on Library Mall, what we learned, how it fits into a larger historical context, and what might come next.

“A Motherhood and Palestine Roundup” [Noha Beshir at Letters From A Muslim Woman]

A great collection of recommendations/links to writing by and about mothers and motherhood as it relates to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

“The truth about Gen Z” [Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up to Politics]

For me, the most frustrating thing about hearing people talk about Gen Z is how much it feels like they are just going off vibes, even though there is abundant data available that can tell us about young people with more accuracy than I or any one else’s individual experiences possibly could.

“Information Access as a Public Good: Learning from Librarians, Libraries and Library Science” [Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000]

Democracy means public, open spaces where civic workers are there to help members of the public navigate to and make sense of information that they need. Democracy means connected communities where people work with one another to understand the world around themselves. 

“New evidence points to submerged village beneath Lake Mendota” [Maggie Ginsberg for Madison Magazine]

This is SO COOL: “More than ten ancient canoes have now been identified in the archaeological site, including one that is a Great Lakes record-breaking 4,500 years old.”

Live Music!

My band, Damsel Trash, is making two rare-ish appearances this summer and I am STOKED! The first gig is coming up this weekend, on Saturday, June 8 at 3 p.m. (omg a daylight show?!). We’ll be playing the Intersection Stage at Milwaukee Pride. If you were planning to be at the festival, or were on the fence and needed a reason to come hang out, we’d love to see you! Festival and ticket info here.

Even bigger, to be honest: We’re celebrating 10 YEARS as a band with a super fun show on Saturday, August 17 at 9 p.m. at the storied Harmony Bar & Grill in Madison. The cherry on top is that our friends and truly incredibly queer pop band Kat & the Hurricane will be opening for us. It’s going to be an awesome party and we hope you can make it! (Facebook event link)

Final Frame.

We don’t really need more rain right now but it was real cool and dramatic watching this front move in this week.

‘Til Next Time.

Thanks for reading and for standing up for your friends and neighbors! Take care of each other out there.

Always feel free to hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots or good books. And please feel free to forward this email to a friend and/or hit that subscribe button. xoxo